57 years ago today the largest nuke ever tested went off

originally posted by: fightzone58
a reply to: watchitburn

i dont make many threads. im just interested in explosions and know the date of this one. figured id share it and see if anyone had any knowledge to share that i dont know

Okay,
Well, some background then. During the cold War, Russia didn't have the advanced guidance systems for their ICBMs that the US did.

So while the US was more focused on strategic strikes and safety features the Russian policy was more along the lines of "we just want it to be guaranteed to work and big enough that we just need to get close"

This eventually lead to the Tsar Bomba, which was designed to be 100 MTons, but was scaled down to 1/2 power for the test out of concerns that it could get out of hand.

Fun fact : Russia still denies it's ever had any kind of mishap with any of its nuclear weapons.

The US has a "One Point Safe" policy for arming nuclear weapons. Look into it, it's pretty interesting. And we have an across the board expected 30% dud rate on all our ordnance for safety concerns. But even with that the US has had dozens of accidents involving our nukes, so much so that we have multiple different code words for different kinds of accidents.

Eventually, the Russians came around to our way of thinking, on their nukes, and their modern ones reflect this, but the vast majority of their arsenal is way past obsolete, and a good deal of it (and the delivery mechanisms) are no longer functional. But, it's a closed society, so the degree of this is going to be largely hidden and guarded. We've got a pretty good idea though.

My bet, Russia is in no position to actually wage a nuclear war or even a massive retaliatory strike...but I'm in no hurry to test that bet. Neither is anyone else, I'm guessing. China, on the other hand, is a different story. Newer nukes and delivery mechanisms than Russia, but many still obsolete. Again though, nobody is eager to test this.

Thing is, most of us grew up thinking that a nuclear war was unsurvivable, and this really isn't the case. I'm in no rush to be among the survivors of one, but it isn't going to be the end of the human race like many of us grew up thinking, especially those of us who grew up during the Cold War. We've been told a LOT of falsehoods (nuclear winter being the main one).